De Zee Custen Van Ruslant, Laplant, Finmarcken, Spitsbergen en Nova Zembla

An attractive 17th-century nautical chart of the European Arctic.

This marvelous 17th-century sea chart captures the frigid, dangerous waters of the Barents and Greenland Seas and the adjacent European coastline between Norway and northern Russia. The Svalbard archipelago, with its largest island of Spitsbergen, and much of Nova Zembla are included within the carefully designed image, which is oriented with north to the right. Toponyms, concentrated along the coast, identify an interesting variety of settlements, geographic features, and important landmarks in a mix of English, Dutch, and Romanticized Russian.

At the time of publication, this expansive stretch of water was a vital (and volatile) commercial thoroughfare from which the furs and ivory of Russia could be exported to eager European markets. An inset, lower left, shows the maritime approaches to Archangel, the only deepwater port accessible for commercial shipping (and even so, it was accessible only part of the year). Further north, Spitsbergen was the capital of the regional whaling industry (note the various anchorages) – its bays and fjords were teeming with bowheads that were processed by the thousands. Several place names reflect the importance of the trade (i.e. Whales Head). To the east could be found the entry point for the romantic dream of the Northeast Passage, a shortcut to the fabled riches of Asia first explored by William Barentz in the 1590s.

The map was published in Amsterdam in either 1666 as part of Pieter Goos’ De Zee-Atlas, Ofte Water-Wereld, one of the finest commercial sea atlases available to the public. Goos was a noted Dutch cartographer who prepared plates for many maps issued in the important atlases of the era. His works dominated the Dutch maritime market until the 1670s, when the Van Keulen family came to prominence.